How to Measure a Cow (17 page)

‘I don’t
want
to fail,’ said Claire, her voice loud. ‘I don’t like failure.’

‘We already failed Tara, Claire,’ said Molly. ‘That’s the explanation for why that reunion didn’t work. It was never going to. Tara will have new friends. She doesn’t need old ones, the ones who were not there when she did need them.’

‘But old friends, friends you’ve known since you were at school, they have to mean something.’

‘Why?’ said Liz.

‘Because they are like foundations,’ said Claire.

Liz immediately laughed.

‘Foundation garments, do you mean, or foundations for a building?’ and she laughed again.

‘You may mock and sneer,’ Claire said. ‘You always did. But you know perfectly well what I mean.’

‘Really?’ said Liz. ‘And what’s that?’

But Claire glared at her and would not reply.

Molly was tired of them both. Claire ever self-righteous, Liz sharp and caustic. She knew how they’d all come together at such a young age, but the puzzle was how this friendship had survived. It hadn’t exactly flourished in the last decade but it was significant surely that it was still there in some shape or form, when they’d had so little in common for so long. All they talked about when they met, or on the phone, was their own history full of do-you-remembers and then often quarrelling over what was remembered.
Tara obviously didn’t want that. She’d said her bit, had her moment, and as far as she was concerned, that was it. Why Claire would not accept this, Molly couldn’t understand. She herself found that she didn’t care if she never saw Tara again. What was so awful about that? But if she said it aloud, Claire would be shocked. Friends old and new were important to Claire in a way Molly knew they were not so important to her. Nice to have good friends, yes, and she had plenty, but more important, she had her children and she had Simon. But Claire rated people according to how many friends of long standing they had. To say of some woman ‘I don’t think she has many friends’ was the ultimate indictment.

‘Anyway,’ Claire said, ‘I don’t think Tara has many friends, from what she was saying.’

‘You haven’t the faintest idea if that’s true,’ said Liz, ‘and even if it is, it’s her own choice and there’s nothing wrong with that.’

‘Yes, there is!’ said Claire, emphatic as usual, but the other two sighed and refused to go on with the subject.

This meeting had not been a great success. Still, there was always a sort of comfort in being together, however far apart they’d become, though they quite often bored each other with detailed accounts of their own children’s progress. It was odd, Liz had often thought, that on their rare meetings all together they never discussed current affairs. The state of the country, the state of the world, was shut out. They seemed only concerned with their own world, with their personal lives. Self-centred, Liz decided. We’re all self-centred.

‘I thought maybe Pica,’ Tara said. ‘There are three houses for rent there, and they’re so cheap.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Nancy. ‘Pica! Back of beyond, no shops, no transport. No wonder the rents are cheap. You’d be stuck, if you went to Pica.’

‘I have a car,’ protested Tara. ‘I wouldn’t be stuck.’

‘What about work, though?’ Nancy asked. ‘There’s no work in Pica. You’d always be travelling. No, get Pica out of your head. Dear me. What about Egremont? Now that’s a nice place, bound to be something there to suit you.’

So Tara drove along the coast road to Egremont. Beside her Nancy was humming, thoroughly enjoying the drive. Tara thought she could risk some direct questions without offending her.

‘Nancy,’ she said, ‘you wear a wedding ring but you never mention your husband. Has he been dead a long time?’

Nancy stopped humming, and fidgeted slightly in her seat.

‘Nearly forty-five years,’ she said.

‘What did he die of?’

‘A stroke,’ Nancy said. And then, after a pause which Tara did not like to interrupt, ‘He was a good man.’

‘Mine wasn’t,’ Tara said. ‘I thought he was when I married him, but he wasn’t.’

Nancy stared ahead and tried to think this information through. What did you say when a woman told you her husband wasn’t a good man? She tried to separate what she wanted to know from what it might be cheeky to ask but got tangled up in her own confusion. She coughed, took a mint from her bag and popped it into her mouth.

‘Would you like one?’ she asked. Tara shook her head.

Nancy sucked the mint for a bit, and coughed again, and then said, ‘I didn’t know you’d been married.’

‘No,’ said Tara, ‘I took my ring off as soon as I was free.’

‘Divorced?’ queried Nancy.

‘No.’

‘He passed away?’ Nancy asked.

‘In a manner of speaking,’ Tara said, and laughed.

Laughed! And ‘in a manner of speaking’. What did that mean? But at that point they arrived in Egremont and Sarah was expressing agreeable surprise. The main street was broad with small, attractive-looking shops lining it. Everything looked newly painted and fresh. A woman walked past the car as they parked, and smiled and nodded as she went behind to cross the street. She was carrying a basket with a gingham cover over it.

Sarah said, ‘A basket! I thought wickerwork baskets were long gone, it’s all carrier bags now.’

‘Nothing like a decent basket for wear and tear,’ said Nancy, ‘but they’re heavy, mind.’

‘Let’s have some lunch,’ Sarah said, ‘my treat.’

It was easy to find a café, settle themselves in comfortable, well-padded chairs at a small table covered in a startlingly clean pink cloth.

‘This is nice,’ Nancy said.

She was, Tara noticed, quite flushed with pleasure. They ordered the home-made soup and rolls, and Tara thought of Liz and that other café.

Nancy knew nothing about her. That was the beauty of being with her. And she had risked spoiling this by
volunteering the news that she had been married and that her husband had not been a very nice man. Nancy, it was easy to tell, was shocked at being told Sarah’s husband had not been a good man, but she hadn’t gone on to ask why, or in what way, he hadn’t been good, or exactly how he died. It was against Nancy’s own personal code. That, Tara suddenly realised, was the attraction of Nancy for her. She wouldn’t prod and poke and drag out any history. She would listen and, on the whole, simply accept what she was told. It was such a relief realising this. Tara’s heart began to beat a little faster as a strange kind of excitement took over. How far was she prepared to go? What was she going to dare to tell Nancy? Why the urge to tell her any more than she had already done? Oh, do be careful, she said to herself, don’t spoil things …

The soup came and was delicious. Nancy was surprised. Soup in cafés was, in her limited experience, never any good. Home-made usually meant out of a tin with something added. But this was a thick broth, the vegetables clearly identifiable, carrots and potato and onion and a whole lot of others. She remarked on how good it was, but Sarah said nothing. She had a funny expression on her face, a sort of half-smile which was not a proper smile, and her lips were compressed in an uncomfortable-looking way, as though inside her mouth she was biting her tongue. She hadn’t touched her soup.

‘You haven’t touched your soup,’ Nancy said. ‘Go on, taste it, it’s really good. Taste it, it’ll get cold, go on. It’ll do you good.’

Slowly, Tara dipped her spoon into the broth, but as it neared her mouth she suddenly put it down again, slightly spilling what had been on it.

‘Oh, dear,’ Nancy said. ‘Here, dab it with this tissue,’ and she pointed to the tiny stain on the pink tablecloth. ‘It’ll come out in the wash,’ she said. ‘Don’t fret.’

It was as though she was speaking to a child. Nobody, Tara thought, aware that tears were coming into her eyes and only rapid blinking was stopping them from falling, has ever told me not to fret when I’ve done something wrong. Dropping a tiny bit of soup on to a tablecloth wasn’t ‘wrong’ but her foster mother would have reprimanded her sharply. She would never have said, ‘Don’t fret.’ No excuses, no comfort, only blame: that had been her foster mother, and then, eventually, Tom.

‘My mother,’ she began, and then stopped.

Nancy looked uncomfortable. Tara could see that what Nancy dreaded was A Scene in a Public Place, and she, to Nancy, must be looking as though she was on the edge of causing one.

‘Sorry,’ she said, and lowered her head, eating more of the soup and not spilling any.

‘There now,’ Nancy said, pleased, ‘you’ll feel better for that.’

Nancy relaxed – thank God, the girl wasn’t going to cry. She wondered if maybe the young woman had had a nervous breakdown in the recent past. It would explain a lot. She couldn’t ask her, of course, but silently tried to think of ways in which she could obliquely bring the subject up. None presented themselves to her at the moment.

‘Should we be getting on?’ she said, the soup finished.

There was no reply.

‘Are you all right?’ Nancy asked.

They’d be in a fine pickle if Sarah wasn’t fit to drive. Who could I call, Nancy wondered, what will I do? She wished this had happened in Workington.

But Sarah had recovered.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘let’s get on, you’re right.’

Nancy loved looking at the houses to let on Sarah’s list. On each doorstep, as the front door opened (all the houses were occupied at the moment) Sarah introduced herself, brandishing the estate agent’s details, and then said, ‘This is my friend Mrs Armstrong.’ This pleased Nancy inordinately. She didn’t want to be on Christian-name terms with strangers and Sarah had deduced that and shown respect. While Sarah talked to the householder, Nancy’s eyes darted round the rooms, taking in the damp patch on the ceiling and the signs of woodworm on the skirting board and the state of the kitchen sink. Two of the houses were so untidy she was embarrassed for the occupiers, unable as she was to believe people could live with dirty dishes piled high and waste bins overflowing, not to mention bathrooms with tide marks engrained on the porcelain and lavatories that hadn’t been bleached in weeks, if ever.

Once back in the car, she exclaimed over what she had seen but Sarah didn’t seem shocked.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we used to live like that when we were young.’

‘Who?’ Nancy asked, before she could stop herself.

‘My friends and I,’ Sarah said. ‘We once shared a flat, just for a year, four of us. We were such slatterns except for Claire, and she couldn’t control us.’

Nancy was silent. She tried to build up an image of Sarah as part of a quartet of slatterns.

‘Well,’ she said, after a long pause, ‘you’ve changed. You keep your house tidy and clean now.’

‘That’s because I’m not me any more. I’m not Tara,’ she said, ‘I’m Sarah.’

Nancy frowned. She repeated the words to herself in her head: ‘I’m not me any more. I’m not Tara, I’m Sarah.’ What was going on? Was Sarah being funny? People were always telling her that they were ‘only being funny’ when she didn’t understand something. But it hadn’t sounded funny. It had sounded despairing, bitter. Nancy struggled with an urgent need to ask a whole list of questions but asked none of them. Best not to pry. She cleared her throat.

‘Which house did you like best?’ she asked, pleased at how innocuous her enquiry was.

‘None of them,’ Sarah said. ‘They all made me want to scream.’

Scream. Here was another conundrum: what was there to scream about? They were just ordinary houses,
nothing
to scream about. Nancy realised she must have made some sort of sound that betrayed her surprise because Sarah/Tara, whatever she was called, then said, ‘Scream with horror at the ordinariness, the way it closed round us, strangling us.’

This was getting ridiculous. The girl was away with the fairies.

‘Nothing wrong with being ordinary,’ Nancy said, rather grimly. She wanted to add, ‘I don’t know what you mean with this fancy, daft talk,’ but she didn’t. Best not to fall out, especially as Sarah/Tara, whatever, was driving and needed to concentrate.

‘Oh, I can’t bear ordinariness, dreariness,’ Tara said, ‘and now I’m ordinary too, looking at ordinary places
to live and hating them all. I want to go back, and I can’t.’

Now, Nancy wondered, which question can I ask first? What would be safe, innocent? ‘Go back to where?’ she dared to ask.

‘My life,’ said Tara.

Nancy really could not take that in. Sarah/Tara was talking as though she had died. This sort of silliness, Nancy decided, should not be encouraged, so she said nothing, just shifted in her seat and fiddled with her seat belt. There was silence, though not a comfortable one, for several miles.

Then Sarah/Tara said, ‘You like your own life, don’t you, Nancy?’

Here we go again, Nancy thought, exasperated.

‘Of course I like my life,’ she said irritably. ‘I only have one, don’t I? You make the best of it, that’s all. It isn’t a matter of liking it. Goodness me.’

That was as far as she was prepared to go. If she said anything else she’d regret it.

They were on their way now to Cockermouth, where there were quite a few houses to rent. Sarah/Tara took to Cockermouth straight away, though Nancy didn’t care for it, never felt comfortable there. It was ‘too county’ she told Sarah/Tara, who didn’t understand what she meant, and Nancy couldn’t explain. It was several years since she’d been to Cockermouth and she had to admit that since the floods in 2010 the main street had been prettified with the shop signs different and the buildings freshly painted. They were looking for a house in Waterloo Street behind the main street.

‘Oh, no,’ Nancy said, even before they went in. ‘Look, it’s too near the river. It might flood again, and
anyway there’d be all that damp all the time, coming off the river.’

‘I like a bit of danger,’ Tara said dreamily.

Nancy clicked her teeth in annoyance. At times, she wanted to give Sarah/Tara a slap. They found the house, and Tara announced that she loved it even before the door was opened. Nancy saw nothing to love. It was a stone house, probably very old, and old houses caused all kinds of problems. Inside it was rather dark except for the kitchen at the back which overlooked the garden sloping slightly down to the river, currently rather high, the water gushing along at a great rate. Nancy shuddered, but Tara was in ecstasies.